For a summary of what I’m hoping to accomplish in this blog series (the first week of every month of 2018), I recommend reviewing my explanation here.
This is it! We’ve travelled this 2018 path of the Top 12 Blog Posts at Covered in His Dust and we have arrived at the end of our list — the most viewed post in my blog’s history. The winner of this title is the blog I wrote on the Resurrection back at the end of August 2015. The post was titled “Empty” and you can read the original post here.
So, for one last time, let’s remember what I’ll try to do.
In this series, as we look at each post, I want to ask three questions: why, what, and what else? Why do I think these posts got so many views; why were others drawn to them? What do I hope people found when they got here; what do I hope they heard? Finally, what else have I learned about this; what else would I say about these ideas?
WHY THIS POST?
Well, if you would have asked me about which post I had hoped would get the most views, it would have been this one. I am a big believer that the most important truth, the most profound reality, the pinnacle of all theology and of the Kingdom is the resurrection. There are many theologians who talk about the crucifixion as being the most central to theology, that everything revolves around the work of Jesus on the cross. Many of these theologians are men and women I respect very deeply. But I respectfully disagree.
The apostle Paul did not say that without the crucifixion, our faith is in vain. No, he said that without the resurrection, our faith is in vain. That’s a strong assertion to make and it drives my theology.
Having said that, I wonder if there are other reasons the page views were driven up. I don’t feel like it was one of my best written posts. Are people that driven and interested in the resurrection? That hasn’t been my experience, typically. I can’t seem to find any unique or unusual words or phrases that would have caught some other Google search. Did people think I was posting about how I was feeling empty and so they were driven to click in and read? That could be.
WHAT DO I HOPE THEY FOUND?
Well, the truth and power of the resurrection is really, in a lot of ways, a mystery. Part of the reason we don’t get more excited about it is because there is so much about it that we don’t understand. Much of the last century has been misdirected in simply trying to prove the historicity of the event. This is a shame, as the power of resurrection doesn’t lie in intellectually proving that it happened. No, the power of the resurrection lies in realizing what it means for our daily walks, trusting that great truth to be real, and leaning into the consequences.
Even I struggled (then and now) to write about the resurrection in such a way that captures the power of this great truth. To that end, I recommend a great book called Surprised by Hope by NT Wright. It does a good job of talking about the resurrection in a western way that helps us capture some of the applicable ramifications of the resurrection.
WHAT ELSE WOULD I SAY?
I would talk about the power of hope.
The story of God’s people, all the way back to the story of Abram, is a story about hope. It’s a story about people who believe there is more going on — that more is possible than simply the concrete thing we experience in the Order of Brokenness. This reality is deeper and greater than a battle between optimism and pessimism. This isn’t about whether or not the glass is half-full or half-empty.
This is about whether or not you believe the glass was meant to be full — and, no matter what happens, will be full again.
The resurrection is about what you fundamentally believe is true about the world. What is the truest true? What is the realest real? What is the thing that if you burned away all of the dross, would remain? Does love win? Does life end in death? Or is death not really an end? And no, I’m not just talking about what happens when we die. I’m talking about the true order of things.
Here. Now. When we are alive.
When the Order of Death rears its ugly head, is it a roar of triumph, or is it the gasping and grasping of a creature whose days are numbered?
When you encounter greed and selfishness, are you dismayed? Or are you grounded — as a Child of the Resurrection — in a truth that what you are looking at is a fleeting shadow? And does this change the way you live?
It should. It should make us more selfless. More generous. It should make us better priests. It should prepare us for Kingdom, making us conduits of God’s redeeming work. It should rid us of fear and equip us to lay our lives down — because we understand that there really is no way to lose our life.
Maybe this is the reason the Rabbi said the only way to save your life is to lose it.
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